EMC buys Rainfinity to improve NAS virtualisation

EMC buys Rainfinity to improve NAS virtualisation

Aug 18, 2005:EMC has agreed to buy Rainfinity for US$100 million to provide a service that aims to reduce the complexities of management of NAS and file system environments that they are used to experiencing with SANs.

Howard Elias, the EMC executive vice president of corporate marketing and office of technology, said that the rapid growth of unstructured file-based information, has demanded higher utilisation rates in these systems.

"Rainfinity is the industry's first standards-based solution available today that virtualises Windows, Unix and Linux file systems, giving customers improved total cost of ownership across all of their heterogeneous NAS and file server platforms.

"With the addition of Rainfinity, EMC is extending the benefits of virtualisation to EMC and non-EMC NAS environments to enable more comprehensive information lifecycle management solutions, better resource management and overall operational improvement."

One of the advantages of Rainfinity's Network File Virtualisation technology is that provides for full read/write access to Windows, Linux and Unix-based files during system migrations, regardless of where the data resides and with no threat of data loss.

EMC outlined other benefits would include users receiving increased networked storage utilisation, non-disruptive upgrades, optimised performance and accelerated networked storage consolidation.

John Schroeder, the CEO of Rainfinity, is thrilled that to be joining EMC and he is excited about the future of NAS and file server management for customers.

"We've spent years developing the unique stateless architecture that is at the core of our file virtualisation technology. It ensures scalability, data integrity and ease of deployment for extremely large and complex network file environments."

Related Article:

EMC denies rumours of discontent over SAMS